Map (13 page)

from the depths of your mass-produced bust.

 

Only now and then,

in a city, one of many.

In a hotel room

overlooking the gutter

with a cat howling like a baby

under the stars.

 

In a city with lots of people,

many more than you'll find painted

on jugs, cups, saucers, and silk screens.

 

In a city about which I know

this one thing:

it's not Kyoto,

not Kyoto for sure.

 

 

This adult male. This person on earth.

Ten billion nerve cells. Ten pints of blood

pumped by ten ounces of heart.

This object took three billion years to emerge.

 

He first took the shape of a small boy.

The boy would lean his head on his aunt's knees.

Where is that boy. Where are those knees.

The little boy got big. Those were the days.

These mirrors are cruel and smooth as asphalt.

Yesterday he ran over a cat. Yes, not a bad idea.

The cat was saved from this age's hell.

A girl in a car checked him out.

No, her knees weren't what he's looking for.

Anyway he just wants to lie in the sand and breathe.

He has nothing in common with the world.

He feels like a handle broken off a jug,

but the jug doesn't know it's broken and keeps going to the well.

It's amazing. Someone's still willing to work.

The house gets built. The doorknob has been carved.

The tree is grafted. The circus will go on.

The whole won't go to pieces, although it's made of them.

Thick and heavy as glue
sunt lacrimae rerum.

But all that's only background, incidental.

Within him, there's awful darkness, in the darkness a small boy.

 

God of humor, do something about him, OK?

God of humor, do something about him today.

 

 

We used matches to draw lots: who would visit him.

And I lost. I got up from our table.

Visiting hours were just about to start.

 

When I said hello he didn't say a word.

I tried to take his hand—he pulled it back

like a hungry dog that won't give up his bone.

 

He seemed embarrassed about dying.

What do you say to someone like that?

Our eyes never met, like in a faked photograph.

 

He didn't care if I stayed or left.

He didn't ask about anyone from our table.

Not you, Barry. Or you, Larry. Or you, Harry.

 

My head started aching. Who's dying on whom?

I went on about modern medicine and the three violets in a jar.

I talked about the sun and faded out.

 

It's a good thing they have stairs to run down.

It's a good thing they have gates to let you out.

It's a good thing you're all waiting at our table.

 

The hospital smell makes me sick.

 

 

This spring the birds came back again too early.

Rejoice, O reason: instinct can err, too.

It gathers wool, it dozes off—and down they fall

into the snow, into a foolish fate, a death

that doesn't suit their well-wrought throats and splendid claws,

their honest cartilage and conscientious webbing,

the heart's sensible sluice, the entrails' maze,

the nave of ribs, the vertebrae in stunning enfilades,

feathers deserving their own wing in any crafts museum,

the Benedictine patience of the beak.

 

This is not a dirge—no, it's only indignation.

An angel made of earthbound protein,

a living kite with glands straight from the Song of Songs,

singular in air, without number in the hand,

its tissues tied into a common knot

of place and time, as in an Aristotelian drama

unfolding to the wings' applause,

falls down and lies beside a stone,

which in its own archaic, simpleminded way

sees life as a chain of failed attempts.

 

 

Dear mermaids, it was bound to happen.

Beloved fauns and honorable angels,

evolution has emphatically cast you out.

Not that it lacks imagination, but

you with your Devonian tail fins and alluvial breasts,

your fingered hands and cloven feet,

your arms alongside, not instead of, wings,

your, heaven help us, diphyletic skeletons,

your ill-timed tails, horns sprouted out of spite,

illegitimate beaks, this morphogenetic potpourri, those

finned or furry frills and furbelows, the couplets

pairing human/heron with such cunning

that their offspring knows all, is immortal, and can fly,

you must admit that it would be a nasty joke,

excessive, everlasting, and no end of bother,

one that mother nature wouldn't like and won't allow.

 

And after all she does permit a fish to fly,

deft and defiant. Each such ascent

consoles our rule-bound world, reprieves it

from necessity's confines—more

than enough for the world to be a world.

 

And after all she does permit us baroque gems

like this: a platypus that feeds its chicks on milk.

She might have said no—and which of us would know

that we'd been robbed?

 

               But the best is that

she somehow missed the moment when a mammal turned up

with its hand miraculously feathered by a fountain pen.

 

 

I am a tarsier and a tarsier's son,

the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers,

a tiny creature, made up of two pupils

and whatever simply could not be left out;

miraculously saved from further alterations—

since I'm no one's idea of a treat,

my coat's too small for a fur collar,

my glands provide no bliss,

and concerts go on without my gut—

I, a tarsier,

sit living on a human fingertip.

 

Good morning, lord and master,

what will you give me

for not taking anything from me?

How will you reward me for your own magnanimity?

What price will you set on my priceless head

for the poses I strike to make you smile?

 

My good lord is gracious,

my good lord is kind.

Who else could bear such witness if there were

no creatures unworthy of death?

You yourselves, perhaps?

But what you've come to know about yourselves

will serve for a sleepless night from star to star.

 

And only we few who remain unstripped of fur,

untorn from bone, unplucked of soaring feathers,

esteemed in all our quills, scales, tusks, and horns,

and in whatever else that ingenious protein

has seen fit to clothe us with,

we, my lord, are your dream,

which finds you innocent for now.

 

I am a tarsier—the father and grandfather of tarsiers—

a tiny creature, nearly half of something,

yet nonetheless a whole no less than others,

so light that twigs spring up beneath my weight

and might have lifted me to heaven long ago

if I hadn't had to fall

time and again

like a stone lifted from hearts

grown oh so sentimental:

I, a tarsier,

know well how essential it is to be a tarsier.

 

 

Thank you, my heart:

you don't dawdle, you keep going

with no flattery or reward,

just from inborn diligence.

 

You get seventy credits a minute.

Each of your systoles

shoves a little boat

to open sea

to sail around the world.

 

Thank you, my heart:

time after time

you pluck me, separate even in sleep,

out of the whole.

 

You make sure I don't dream my dreams

up to that final flight,

no wings required.

 

Thank you, my heart:

I woke up again

and even though it's Sunday,

the day of rest,

the usual preholiday rush

continues underneath my ribs.

 

 

From trapeze to

to trapeze, in the hush that

that follows the drum roll's sudden pause, through

through the startled air, more swiftly than

than his body's weight, which once again

again is late for its own fall.

 

Solo. Or even less than solo,

less, because he's crippled, missing

missing wings, missing them so much

that he can't miss the chance

to soar on shamefully unfeathered

naked vigilance alone.

 

Arduous ease,

watchful agility,

and calculated inspiration. Do you see

how he waits to pounce in flight; do you know

how he plots from head to toe

against his very being; do you know, do you see

how cunningly he weaves himself through his own former shape